Do you really feel free? What is the black man’s purpose? What do you think of white women? What is so cool about selling crack? Are you black first or a man first? Why didn’t you leave us a blueprint?

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wisely advised us to be patient with the unsolved in our heart and to love the questions. You have to – no, you better — love the questions in Question Bridge: Black Males, the penetrating and uncompromising video installation currently on view through June 3, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Interrogation is not only the point of departure of this exhibition, it is the point.

Created by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair, Black Males explores the various critical issues confronting African American males from both within and outside of their community. Featuring dialogue among 150 black men spanning a varied socio-economic, generational, and educational range, the installation instigates a running conversation (of at least two hours’ duration) where the men are both interviewers and interviewees, asking and responding to each others’ probing questions. The editing of the videos gives the impression that the men are engaged in conversation.

Over four years, the collaborators traveled throughout the United States to locations including New York, Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, producing 1,500 video exchanges in which the subjects, whose names and styles of self-expression are as diverse as their locations (even Andrew Young, former Ambassador to the United Nations and former mayor of Atlanta, is in the mix) get to “get down” and offer honest viewpoints about what it has meant and means to be a black man in America.

The idea for Black Males first took root in 1996 when Chris Johnson was looking for a new way to use media as a means to initiate meaningful conversation around the issues of class and generational divisions within San Diego’s African American community. Johnson invited ten members of the black community to express their deeply-felt beliefs and values through candid Question and Answer exchanges in front of a video camera; none of the questions and answers were prompted. Ten years later, Hank Willis Thomas suggested to Johnson that they collaborate on a similar project devoted solely to the subject of black men.

By its design and content, the installation serves as a trans-media forum wherein the men challenge, assert, reflect, and riff off each others’ questions and commentaries. No topic is off-limits, and the men, reduced literally to talking heads, hold forth with anger, humor, profanity, and affection, about love, race relations, family, sexuality, and depression among black men.

Located on the second floor mezzanine of the museum, the space for Black Males is pared down to the barest essentials; simple benches surrounded by gray walls bearing statements by the collaborating artists, as well as quotes from historical figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, early 20th century writer, teacher and anthropologist, who spoke and wrote insightfully on the unique psychological dilemma experienced by black people, what he termed the “double-consciousness, this sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

This unflinching self-interrogation and self-assessment comes at a critical period in history for the black community and for black men in particular, a period marked by progress and ambiguity. As the subjects’ questions and responses suggest, there is more paradox than uniformity in black men’s lives despite the advances of the last 50 years. Despite the ushering in of a so-called “post-racial” society, due to the election of Barack Obama as this country’s first African American president, Americans, including black people themselves, continue to harbor negative attitudes and stereotypes relative to black males, which in turn affects this group’s ability to function successfully, let alone view themselves as fully-realized men.

“I meditate and seek quiet time, pray first thing in the morning, and the last thing at night,” says one speaker earnestly from the screen. “I love older people,” says another in referring to the elders in his own life. Andrew Young, one of the older generations, underscores the importance of “standing up to evil,” in response to a younger man who expresses the difficulty of trying to do good when surrounded by so much evil. A dapper, pin-striped exec rails against “babies making babies,” asserting that “smart needs to become sexy.” As for the infamous “N-word,” there, too, is divergence of opinion, with some subjects viewing its use by blacks as a form of true liberation, while others condemn those who would perpetuate the racism the word connotes.

The questions and answers offered by black gay men adds another dimension to Black Males, creating a heretofore unheard dialogue between black gay and straight men whose interactions have historically ranged from misunderstanding to hostility. Rapprochement, rather than recrimination, is the new order resulting from the video “conversation” between these distinct groups, an indication that each side has learned to listen to the other and have arrived at a place where they concur on what is shared rather than different between them.

Black Males falls unquestionably in the social commentary column; yet the artists’ deft manipulation of their subjects’ screen images – sometimes appearing on one monitor, then another, or even on all five at once – is not unlike what Claude Monet had done in an earlier era with his multiple takes on haystacks or the Notre Dame Cathedral. An utterance hits the viewer-listener either harder or softer, depending on the angle from which it arrives. This is how Monet might have come across in the video age.

Multi-screen implies the multi-faceted character of the contemporary black male persona. Multiple viewpoints engenders (and heightens) different screen views. While the non-black world persists in defining black men’s thoughts and behaviors as monolithic, the installation forcefully contradicts that belief, insisting that black males are as complex, nuanced, and “diverse” as all other groups in this country, and that the “parameters of blackness,” in the words of one subject, are pliable rather than static.

At nearly three hours, Black Males is long, but like any good show, we don’t want to go anywhere, not even to the bathroom, if needs be, for fear of missing something. For a show where mythologies are dismantled and black men loving black men is seen as a revolutionary act, we better stay right where we are.

“Question Bridge: Black Males” can be viewed at the Brooklyn Museum at 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052. For more information regarding the exhibition and visiting hours please visit http://www.brooklynmuseum.org or call (718)-638-5000.

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